Recent Profile Visitors

To be fair, holding onto the plant is not itself a sunk cost fallacy. So long as there was some probability of needing it again (such as if major issues were found with the stainless steel design), it makes sense to retain it.
However, they must have reached a tipping point where the chance of ever needing it was too small compared to the cost of upkeep... which goes along with the rumor that the rent was being increased.

Maybe for KSP 2.0. For now, it'd shut out players running on old machines.
80% is very much your opinion. I'll also point out that it's hard to do well; most AAA video games occur on the ground level, and don't have you physically flying through clouds. There probably aren't many people out there who can do convincing volumetric clouds.
Unfortunate indeed... but KSP is going to be a hard sell regardless. KSP's cartoony aesthetic is grounded far deeper than just clouds.
You deserve exactly what you paid for. No more, no less. Feeling entitled to something does not make you entitled to it.
Were that even remotely important, KSP would have sold far more than an estimated ~5 million copies. People rate KSP highly because either A, they want to show off their educated gamer credentials, or B, they're one of the handful of space nerd/gamers for which there is almost no other option. People almost never rate KSP low because almost nobody buys KSP unless they're already the sort to like it.

In no way does my like constitute condoning Bridenstine's message.
My interpretation of this is that they're willing to live with the hypocrisy of proving a better solution and claiming that the pork barrel is necessary.
In short: "Don't worry. We may be furious that you're so many years behind schedule and so many billions above your budget, and we do need to show progress... but do not worry for your jobs, the pork shall continue to flow. We don't give jobs based on antiquated concepts like merit, after all. We're just going to launch Re-Election Mission 1 and go back to wasting the American public's money."

And the fraction of that $1.8 billion they are willing to give to KSP is tiny.
What you want isn't Take Two's priority. Its priority, first and foremost, is probably something like Grand Theft Auto. Several dozen places down the list is "easy to implememt features likely to bring customers to this niche space game we bought on the cheap."
Presumably, clouds are a few notches down from there.

Almost forgot to get back to this.
1) On how to make an equatorial LEO orbit in RSS: Mostly, you don't. There's no real reason to, and the plane change maneuver necessary when launching from most launch sites is brutal.
2) MechJeb can create a maneuver to change your inclination at an equatorial AN/DN.
3) If you're trying to match planes with a specific target, my general suggestion is to use the stock AN/DN icons in the map, which will update based on your maneuvers.
4) To reach the Moon in RSS, there are three typical cases:
A: You are launching from a site with latitude less than the Moon's inclination. In this case, just wait for the Moon's orbital track to pass over the launch site, and launch into the Moon's plane. There's some discussion on the exact math involved here:
B: You are launching from a site with roughly the same latitude as the Moon's inclination. This is a special case of A, where you wind up launching due east. In the absence of Principia, Kennedy Space Center is basically always this way.
C: You are launching from a higher latitude. This is more complicated. What I generally do is wait for these conditions to be true.
First, the Moon has to be about 60 degrees before one of its equatorial nodes. This happens twice a month.
Second, your launch site has to be pointed 90 degrees away from one of its AN/DNs, preferably in the orientation where an eastbound launch will minimize relative inclination.
By having both of these be true, you can meet the Moon at one of its ascending/descending nodes, and hopefully minimize plane-change dV.

You are giving NASA far too little credit. SLS, Orion, and their ground systems combined are less than 1/4 of NASA's budget. In the meantime, NASA is:
Maintaining the ISS.
Churning out a steady stream of unmanned missions to LEO and beyond: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current is just the currently active missions, not counting retired missions and upcoming missions.
Developing new technologies and effectively sponsoring upcoming aerospace companies.
Maintaining the Deep Space Network dishes that are necessary for... well, deep space missions.
Engaging in education and outreach activities.
There is one part of NASA, benefiting from political patronage, that is effectively a jobs program. Most of the rest is an excellent scientific institution.

I suspect part of why Ike and Gilly are the ways they are is to provide different types of challenge to newish players without them needing to go all the way to Jool.
Ike: Very large, can disrupt near-Duna operations, but quite useful for gravity braking. Of course, once you're there, you need a hefty chunk of dV to land.
Gilly: Tiny, relatively hard to rendezvous with, but trivially easy to operate around once you're there.
Of course, the king and queen of "tiny rock" are to be found in Real Solar System: Phobos and Deimos. I haven't yet quite needed to start my insertion burns while still outside their spheres of influence... but it's been close.

The rationale for nuclear reactors is because those two exceptions *do* exist. RTGs will continue to have a niche in providing small amounts of electricity for craft that don't need much... the reactors would have their niche in providing lots of electricity for high-intensity operations at distant worlds.
If the wiki is to be believed*, you'd need 57 RTGs to run a 2.5m ISRU and large drill, or 11 RTGs for a single ion engine. While workarounds exist for both (exploiting the absurdity of running ISRU off fuel cells powered by ISRU, loads of batteries), reactors would be another way to deal with those issues.
*I haven't played stock in forever, so this could stand a bit of checking.
EDIT: There's also plenty of mods which have high-power-consumption parts, and having stock reactors could lessen the dependence on mods like Near Future Electrical. They've done good work, but for many people, the fewer mods they need, the better.

Yes, which is why Making History skipped on making LR-87 analogues, and how Squad never bothered to add alternate launch sites, or...
Yeah, I'm not buying that explanation. It doesn't help that, in this case, the primary mod option (Scatterer) can be quite buggy.
While there are a number of things mods already do, there's clearly incentive to re-do them in stock.

Scatterer clouds have been buggy, and it would likely be unusable for lower-end computers. It's also quite likely that Squad hasn't had anybody with the right expertise on the team to create good-looking clouds.
This, suffice to say, has been done. Squad is drowning in feedback. The question is: what can they reasonably implement, what will bring in more customers, and what has the least risk of having development costs spiral out of control?

He's running 6.4x scale with SMURFF, which explains the need for 7 km/sec of dV.
To Iguas: you are going to need to make a serious break from stock SSTO designs. These get the bulk of their delta-V from jet engines... whereas for you, you're probably looking at maybe 30% at most coming from jets.
I'm also unsure on how to solve your reentry heating problems, other than possibly writing an MM patch to increase the max temps of spaceplane parts.
If I may make a suggestion, though: a marginal SSTO makes the start of an excellent TSTO. If you're willing to install StageRecovery, you could potentially add a booster stage, separate that at roughly 1.5 km/sec, and finish the rest on a more vacuum-optimized design.

This suggestion would add needless complexity and only really affect super-long-duration missions like maximum-efficiency Grand Tour missions and communication relays. There is already a strong balancing element in that they are expensive and very heavy compared to their EC output.
While not totally realistic, many of these long-term efforts produce some of the most spectacular KSP missions.